This blog consists of PhotoFeature Stories on artists of all genres, human interest stories, guest blog posts, book reviews, and book excerpts.
CHRIS RICE COOPER is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter.
She has a Bachelor's in Criminal Justice and is close to completing her Master's in Creative Writing.
She, her husband Wayne, sons Nicholas and Caleb, cats Nation and Alaska reside in the St. Louis area.

“THE GOLDEN PEACOCK is a mystery. Though Hitler is on the cover (is there a more iconic
image of the Holocaust?), the backstory of Jana Lutken weaves in and out with
the actual story, which takes place in the 1990s.

The protagonist is Rainee Allen, a
writer who stumbles across a long-held secret involving a Holocaust survivor
with Alzheimer’s. There are several twists and surprises which the reader never
sees coming.”

--Lauren B Grossman, describing The Golden Peacock

The Golden Peacock is the story of two
women each living across the globe and in two different time zones:Jana Lutken in Germany and England during
World War Two and Rainee Allen in Boston, Massachusetts and England in 1997.

The Golden Peacock begins in October of
1938 in Germany where 12-year-old Jana Lutken and her family are hiding in Christian
neighbor Franz Shenkel’s house from a violent ant-Semitic mob rioting the
streets of Frechen, Germany.

We jumped at the violent sound of glass
shattering.An axe crashed through the
window, ricocheted off the kitchen wall, and landed within inches of my
back.It was close.Too close.Papa tightened his protective grip around us.

I began to cry and Papa hushed me
straightaway.“Shush, Jana.Keep quiet.Not a noise.”I had never seen my
father so alarmed.The look in his eyes
was frightening.

Jana whose mother has died, now considers family
to be her father whom she calls Papa,
Aunt Gertie, brother Max, and two cousins, Adelheid and Mathilde.The family flees to Amsterdam, Holland
thinking it would remain free from Hitler and his regime.They were wrong, and find themselves starving
and destitute.

Papa and Aunt Gertie insist the children be sent
to Burgerweeshuis, a Catholic orphanage willing to take in Jewish refugee
children.

The six of us walked to the Burgerweeshuis in
silence.It was the longest walk of my
life.I held tight to Papa’s hand, and he
held Max’s.Aunt Gertie, flanked by my
two cousins, walked behind us.She
needed privacy with her children and Papa needed the same.

The silence was cruel.There were no birds chirping, no vendors
selling their wares, no streetcars running.The only sound was our footsteps, each step took me further away from
the person I loved most in the world.

I could no longer bear the eerie silence, and in
my nervousness, I began to hum.It was a
Yiddish song Mama and Papa had sung to Max and me called “The Golden
Peacock.”Max had changed the words to
make it funny and about me.It became
our song, and we used to laugh at his lyrics.He came to call me his “golden peacock.”Soon, Max began to hum and then Papa,
too.It must have overwhelmed him, for
suddenly Papa’s legs buckled, and he fell to his knees crying.He embraced us both very tightly as we
huddled together.

There
are two different versions of the Yiddish folk song “The Golden Peacock” about
a miserable bride, exiled from her parents’ home and imprisoned by her mother
–in-law.

The
first version, described in Ginzburg & Marek’s anthology, Jewish
Folksongs in Russia, 1901, the golden peacock functions as a
messenger between the girl and her family.

The
second version, described in Beregovsky's collection of Jewish Folksongs
(1938), the girl turns herself into a golden peacock and flies to her parents'
home.

Max and Jana wait impatiently to hear from their
father, but when months pass with no word, the two become like the golden
peacock and run away, only to end up back at the orphanage, each faced with harsh
punishment and separated from one another.

Then the mysterious and blonde Frau
Wijsmuller-Meijer shows up at the orphanage and arranges to have all the 70
Jewish boys and girls placed on a ship and sent to Great Britain where they
will be taken in by English families.

The plan is that Jana and Max will board the
ship together and be taken in by the same family, but fate is cruel at the last moment: only the girls are allowed to
board the first ship and Jana never sees Max again. She is told that Max died along with all the other boys on the second ship due to being torpedoed
by a Nazi submarine.

Sixty years later, American bestselling author
Rainee Allen resides in Boston where she is at a crossroads: she questions the
choice she made when she was 19, and is suffering from writer’s block.

Things change when Rainee goes through her
roll top desk and comes across the Identification Card on a Jana Lutkin.

She flashed back to a business convention in
Washington D.C. six years earlier.A
co-worker had suggested they visit the Holocaust Museum.Picked arbitrarily from a large bin, the
ticket clerk had handed each of them a passport, identification card of a
Holocaust survivor.

She thought, Now
why did I keep this all these years?

When she began to read it, the reason became
evidence.Rainee had received the
passport of a woman who shared her birthday. It was coincidental that this
survivor’s birthday was February 9, 1927 and Rainee’s birthday was February 9,
but thirty years later.Rainee recalled
this old coincidence had touched a feeling deep inside her.She did not know why, but it had affected her
emotionally.

She pointed it out to a co-worker, wiped some
tears from her eyes and said, “I know it sounds silly, but I tend to believe
things like this happen for a reason.”

Her friend agreed. “These types of coincidences are one of life’s
little gifts.”

The chapters alternate between Jana’s life and
Rainee’s life, and through their voices numerous things are revealed:sexual violence, lies, Alzheimer’s, old
loves, new loves, secret identities, and family secrets.

The reader learns about Jana and the horrors she
had to face before and after her escape from Hitler's Germany. Even though Jana escapes the concentration camps – her
depression, her trauma is just as valid as the Jew who suffered the Holocaust
while living in the concentration camps. The Golden Peacock proves pain is pain – and someone else’s pain, though different, never negates another person’s pain.

And there is the big great conversion of
past and present when Rainee discovers Jana living in a nursing
home suffering from Alzheimer’s. Jana also experiences flashbacks and panic attacks
each time Dr. Martin Wagner comes to visit.

Things become dangerous when Rainee discovers why Dr. Wagner holds the key to Jana’s memory, and when Jana finally
remembers The Golden Peacock and sings
it out loud – their lives will never be the same.

***

Scripted
Interview With

Lauren B. Grossman

Lauren
B Grossman, born in 1955, was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts.

I am
one of four siblings. My parent’s goal was that we like each other and get
along. I think we may have been the exception to the rule. I remember friends
visiting and couldn’t believe that we all got along so well. We are all now
grown with our own grown children. We are still close and love each other very
much.

At the age of eleven, Grossman started writing her first novel
she titled Death and Transfiguration.

That’s the title of a symphony. It was about a woman with a terminal
illness. I was a dark child with a big vocabulary. I never got very far.

Then at 25, I began a book about Nantucket women during the whaling days.
I didn’t get very far. Two books with a beginning, but no middle and no end.
Imagine my delight when I completed my first novel!

Besides those incomplete novels, I wrote articles for a newspaper and
one for a national magazine. Two of my short stories won “Honorable Mention”
with the Writer's Digest Short Stories competitions. That gives me great pride
because there were 17,000 submissions with the first story. Currently, I have a
work in progress.

Even though Grossman had the yearning and the calling to
write, her original plan was to be an actress.

I was determined to be an actress from the age of eleven.
That gave me direction and a career path.

After earning a degree in theatre from Emerson College with
a minor in set design, I moved to Hollywood to seek my fame and fortune. It
wasn’t long before I realized I was a little fish in a big pond.

I returned to my hometown and became a big fish in a little
pond. I continued my theatre career there while earning money in the family
business. I was acting, creating set designs, and on the boards of many theatre
groups and feeling very self-important. I also opened an acting school for
children.

After marrying and having children, I gave up acting and
co-founded and co-published a performing arts newspaper with a good friend.
That evolved into a weekly radio show. We laughed a lot during those days.

When my children were seven and five, we moved to Southern
Arizona.

Needing to “create” I took up painting. When my hands began
to hurt from my multiple sclerosis, I took up writing (typing) and my debut
novel was born.

Grossman
describes herself as a writer with disABILITIES.

I have Multiple Sclerosis and try to advocate by spreading awareness. My
first novel had a main character who received the diagnosis of MS. In my
writing, I endeavored to spread awareness by showing how having the disease can
affect a person and their relationships. In THE GOLDEN PEACOCK, I introduced a character who has MS.
Although she is a minor character in the story, I feel I am on a mission to
continue spreading awareness.

In this story, however, Alzheimer’s Disease prominently figures into the
storyline. I am trying to make people aware that there are Holocaust survivors
who do have Alzheimer's and, sadly in their waning years, relive the horrors of
the war. Try to imagine what that must be like.

As far as how MS affects my own writing, I would have to say that now my
fingers don’t fly over the keyboard as fast anymore. They tire, as do I.
Fatigue is a symptom from which most people with MS suffer.

Cognitive issues affect me, as well. Although I have done radio interviews,
I’m glad this is not one, as I would have to look at notes to answer your very
well-posed questions.

In
2005 Lauren Grossman visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and received a souvenir
identity card.

The Holocaust identification cards are handed out to anyone who enters.
They are arbitrarily picked from a large bin. As people exit, they are allowed
to keep them or recycle them in that bin.

That was a day I will never forget. My family was on vacation in D.C. and
we (husband Michael) wanted our children (Rachel and Zach) to experience the
Holocaust Museum. (They were then 14 and 17 years old).

Each of us were handed an ID card. Each card had as much information as
possible for an individual person who may or may not have survived the
Holocaust.

My card had the picture, name, city, country, and date of birth of a
survivor (Dora Unger). I did a double-take when I saw that she was born on
January 7, 1925 – 30 years to the date of my birth date. I’m not a true
believer in fate, but I know that had I entered five minutes later, I may not
have received that same card. Some people might call it synchronicity.

I read the information on the card. It was in the survivor’s own words
and it was only about 200 words. Dora had left for
England on one of the last Kindertransports (children’s transports) — a series
of rescue efforts that brought thousands of Jewish refugee children to Great
Britain from Nazi-occupied countries in Europe between 1938 and 1940.

Dora’s story intrigued me enough to save my card, and I felt I was given
her story for a reason. She became my muse.

In
2012 Lauren B Grossman was cleaning out her desk when she re-discovered the
card of Dora Unger.

After my novel ONCE IN EVERY
GENERATION debuted, I was delighted with the global response to it.
There were over 14,000 downloads but I spent a full year promoting it.

At the end of that year I realized that I had not written anything, not
even a short story, which I used to love writing. I wanted to get back to
writing, but I literally had no idea what I would write about. Like my
protagonist in THE GOLDEN PEACOCK,
when I get writer’s block, I get busy cleaning. I started with my desk, and
came across the ID card, sat down to reread it, and instantly knew that there
was a story there.

My life paralleled that of my protagonist, Rainee Allen, up until she
actually met Jana Lutken. A friend of mine was going to London on assignment
for 10 days and asked me to accompany her, all expenses paid. How could I say
no? That was where my research began.

A friend of mine, who is an English professor at the University of
Arizona, wrote a letter of introduction so that I could have access to the
archives in the British Library.

It was exciting to be able to
begin research. However, because my character, who was based on my muse, was
not a “person of note,” there was no information on her. However there was a
lot of information on other people, places, dates, etc. which do appear in the
novel.

Grossman
first heard the song The Golden Peacock
while researching for the book The Golden
Peacock.

In my research, I was able to Google the song. It was in Yiddish. There
are several different versions. I chose one version that would lend itself to a
young boy changing the lyrics to make it silly and about his family. I assigned
my own brother that task since he is very clever.

Lauren
B Grossman researched and wrote the novel, which took her two years, from her
trip to London until she had the printed version in her hands.She did most of the writing of The Golden Peacock at the local
café.

I would go to a café and sit at the same table about three times a week.
There were two times when I arrived and someone was at my table. I actually had a little trouble writing those days.
Funny how that happens. Once I opened my laptop, my hands flew over the
keyboard as if they had a life of their own. It was an exhilarating feeling.
Four hours would pass before I looked up and realized it was time to get up and
stretch!

Lauren
B Grossman’s strategy for writing The
Golden Peacock was simply to not have a strategy.

I’m not an outliner. I had no strategy. The book wrote itself. Of course,
I’m writing about the first draft. I once read, “The first draft is written
from the heart. The second draft is written from the head.” So true. The really
hard work came with the second, third, and fourth drafts.

How much of THE
GOLDEN PEACOCK is fiction and how much is fact?

THE GOLDEN PEACOCK was inspired by real events. I
did follow much of what was written in the ID I was handed at the US Holocaust
Museum. But the survivor’s story ended after about 200 words and that’s not
enough for a novel. I like to call my novel “Historical Fiction,” since I used
real people, places, events, dates, etc. that were real. I changed the
survivor’s name, date of birth, and where she was born. The true person’s
mother, father, and brother died in the camps at Sobibor and Auschwitz.

In my story, Jana Lutken’s father was alive, as was her brother. This was
pivotal to the storyline. My muse was saved when, at the orphanage in which she
was placed, a woman (who was later honored as “Righteous Among Nations”), in
the middle of the night, rescued about 70 children by placing them on a
Kindertransport to Great Britain. My muse’s story ended there. Everything that
followed was fiction.

What
was the most compelling excerpt to write from THE GOLDEN PEACOCK ?

Even though it’s backstory, the first paragraph in the book, really grabs
you.

Also, when Jana is saying goodbye to her papa at the orphanage – that’s a
real tear-jerker.

The rape scene was tough to take!Was this planned for you to write? Or did it
also take you by surprise?

Yes, it was a very tough scene to write. Much of what I
wrote took me by surprise.

I drew a lot of information from a book titled, “Children’s Exodus – A History of the
Kindertransport.” It contained a lot of personal entries. Though many families
were happy to foster the children, sadly, some of the children who rode the
Kindertransport , were used like slaves, and some were abused either verbally
or sexually.

One example in the book reported a particular child who was
repeatedly raped not only by her foster father but also by his 19-year-old son.

It appeared that these cases were the exceptions. Most
foster parents took their role seriously and often welcomed the children as
members of their family.

Were there any books and/or writers that you read that
helped you in writing THE GOLDEN PEACOCK?

The biggest help in my research was the book “Children’s
Exodus – A History of the Kidertransport.”

My brother Bernie was a big help in the editing. We would
speak nearly weekly after I’d send him my written pages. He offered many
suggestions and helped me view the writing from the male perspective.

Who
are you more common with Jane or Rainee? And can you describe those common
traits?

I am more Rainee. We’re both writers.
I lived on Marlborough Street in Boston. And we both searched for our muse.

Can
you describe the publishing process of THE
GOLDEN PEACOCK?

It’s a lot of work. Hard work. I now have a literary agent who is
shopping it around to the mainstream publishing houses, but meanwhile, I am
still promoting every day. Many people have said it would make a great movie,
so I am promoting that route too. Know anybody?

Can you go into detail about the cover?I’m thinking the little girl is Jana?Why was Rainee not represented on the cover?

Yes, the girl is a young Jana Lutken, looking out the farm
window, waiting for her brother Max. Jana spent her life waiting for Max to
appear. Faded into the background is Hitler. I wanted his image to not be
prominent, but almost ghostly... hence the faded imagery.

My talented nephew, Evan Jaroslow, created the front and
back cover.

Although Rainee is the protagonist in the novel, the story
centers around the mystery of Jana’s backstory.

The cover has been controversial
because of Hitler’s image. What more iconic image of the Holocaust is there? I
put a survey out on Facebook and found that 50% of people would NOT pick up the
book if they saw it at the bookstore because of Hitler’s image. While
the other 50% found the girl’s face haunting and were drawn to pick it up and
read the back cover. 50/50. What’s a writer to do?

I love hearing opinions from readers – good or bad, I learn from
everybody.

Thank you for this opportunity and thank you to all the readers.

Photograph
Description & Copyright Information

1

Jacket
cover of The Golden Peacock

2

Lauren
B. Grossman

Copyright
granted by Lauren B. Grossman

3

Polish
Jews expelled from Germany in late October of 1938

Public
Domain

4

City
of Rottendam after the German bombing during the German invasion of the
Netherlands in May of 1940

Public
Domain

5

Here
Polish World War II war orphans are being cared for at a Catholic orphange
after the War in 1946. The wire service caption read, "Polish orphans of
War: Some of Poland's thousands of orphans, these young boys libe on a Catholic
orphanage in Lublin. The American Red Cross, which took this picture, advised
most of these children's clothing and medicines are supplied by that
organization." Lublin was the center of the Soviet-backed Polis regime
during the War.

Swimming for the Ark is the
first book to be published by White Pine Press’s new Distinguished Poets Series
funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Murray has also written four
other poetry collections:The
Same Water (Wesleyan)
which earned her the Wesleyan New Poets Series Competition; Looking
for the Parade (W.W. Norton & Company), which was chosen by
Robert Bly as the winner of the National
Poetry Series Open Competition; Queen of the Mist (Beacon
Press), which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates as the runner up for a Poetry
Society American award, and earned Murray her first Broadway commission; and, Dancing
on the Edge (Beacon Press).

She has
also edited three poetry anthologies:Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times (Beacon Press), Poems
to Live by in Troubling Times (Beacon Press), and The
Pushcart Book of Poetry: the Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize (Pushcart
Press).

Swimming
For The Ark New & Selected Poems 1990-2015, 203
pages, is divided into five sections: from each of her four poetry collections,
and “New Poems,” the first section
in the book.

There
are three dominant themes in this collection:that of the beggar, the spiritual, and the seeker.

The
beggar is defined as a person or creature that has exceeded all resources and
capabilities of acquiring something that is necessary for physical life.The beggar, in the process of begging, also
makes it understood that he, she, or it will never be able to return the favor,
the gift, nor the payment.

Murray
uses spiritual symbolism throughout the collection to impact her poems:images of Jesus, Peter, Mother Mary, Thomas,
scenes from parables Jesus told, and other spiritual elements are detected
throughout her poetry. In many of the
poems the speaker of the poem is a little girl who portrays herself and her
mother as the Mother Mary.

Finally ingrained in all of humanity regardless if we are focused on begging for food
or for spiritual awakening – there is the seeker in all of us, the seeker of a
quest – the drive to find and discover something we don’t have and can not be
granted by physical means such as food, clothing or shelter.

At
first I, as the reader, was only focusing on the “beggar” aspect of these poems
but felt disjointed.There was also
spirituality and a quest theme in these poems that could not be denied.

In “What Was Expected” a woman encounters
opossum – which in this poem is the beggar – begging the woman for food.The woman experiences a sense of god-like power
by comparing herself to Jesus’s disciple Peter. She tries to practice her god-like power and
convince herself that she could turn this opossum into a cat.She opens the door, only to have the opossum
back away in fear, abandoning the cat’s bowl of food.She describes the opossum as a beggar,
inserting even more spiritual metaphors- that of comparing the opossum to baby
Jesus.

because he guessed, dumb beggar, I wouldn’t
pursue him,

only leave him to his hunger and the dicey
scraps of winter

as the stars did in December when he came.

The
beggar in “The Gypsy Child” is a mouse the reader is warned to stay away
from, similar to the pig that Christ warned us to stay away from, and a warning
of what would happen if we went near the pig – it would be like throwing out
precious pearls into the swine.In
this poem the pig is the mouse and the pearls are the sugar.

There
is a twist – the speaker of the poem becomes the predator to the beggar by
condemning the mouse to death by allowing it to gorge on the sugar.

Give the mouse the run of your house

and it will beat a path to your bag of sugar

and gorge itself with a happiness that

could move you to tears, which is what

I gave it, right there –with my fingers

in the mess it had left with me.

The woman
regrets the way she treated the mouse and feels guilty for not having sympathy
for the beggar mouse, only to realize that she is the beggar in spiritual need.

And now I’m left with what I’ve lost –

the simple capacity to be stirred by simple
things

The
woman deems the humanity problem is not due to the amount of food begged for or
the amount of good granted but the human race loosing the ability to feel
surprised with each oncoming action.

Maybe sympathy comes best

when it’s got some element of surprise to it-

like when you stop on 14th street and
reach

for your wallet the first time the Gypsy child

grabs your arm and tells you she’s hungry.

But the next time, though she’s probably

just as hungry, which may be

considerably or not at all,

you push her hand away

In the
spiritual world we as humanity are all beggars praying to God, the One who has
lost the element of surprise, a gift He’s bestowed upon humanity, a gift that
we are begging God to take back.

In “Just Taste Them” the speaker of the
poem compares seven cheeses to the seven sacraments, the tasting of these cheeses
to Communion, and chanting to the Catholic communion prayer.

In the
closing of the poem the speaker identifies her father as a stranger of a god,
who looks into the refrigerator wondering at these cheesey sacraments and what
they are there for.It is here that the
old adage that daughters view god the way they view their father is true.

and would come upon those odd-named things

and wonder what they were doing there –

as if they’d come from somewhere very far away-

the food of some strangers

or maybe their gods

In “The Gardener’s Wife” the speaker identifies
her father as a gardener and a nurturer, two traits that he shares with God,
but those traits are lost the moment God brings the gardener and the gardener’s
wife into existence.

Perhaps God is Dr.
Frankenstein and we are the monsters – or is it the other way around?

And every weekend he tended it by hand,

he put up twigs and twine, he weeded, watered,

the way God must have done before he brought in

the gardener and the gardener’s wife

and everything went wrong.

In “The Precarious Nest” God the father is
depicted as a neglectful father which is universal to all of humanity – at one
point or another every human being has felt neglected by God.By sharing this universal truth there is hope
and loss all at the same time.

Whatever we prayed to once

is there outside the porch panes, still

answering or
ignoring our prayers.

There is always some weed that the garden loves.

In “Swimming For The Ark” the speaker
compares her mother to the Virgin Mary.

And my mother closed herself

into the phone booth like the Virgin ascending
to heaven

In “Lifeline” the speaker of the poem
compares herself to the Mother Mary with elements of being a savior to the
sinful turtle, another beggar.

and there I knelt

like the Madonna at the manger

on a rock big enough to sacrifice anything on,

and I set the turtle down and mumbled

something like “live long and prosper,”

to which it must have said “amen”

before I let it go.

In “Fiat” the speaker of the poem is the
Virgin Mary and the God the creator all in one via the voice of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel and live to tell the tale.

Then – like the Virgin Mary –

I was quickened:

I got down on my knees

and spread two lengths of pattern stock

and began to sketch a shape:

I rounded it and tapered it,

added and erased

-till I knew it would accommodate my size.

In “Debriefing” the speaker of the poem
compares herself to Thomas, the disciple who doubted Jesus and his resurrection
and had to touch his side before he was convinced.

-until a trio of surgeons

began to probe my torso (maybe looking for a
gash

to put their hands in – so they could prove, as
in the gospel,

that I truly was alive.

In “The Same Water” one questions why he
or she should believe in anything, when, regardless of what we believe, we all
experience “The Same Water?”

Sooner or later each kid who fishes

in uneventful water

where the bob only bobs and is not pulled under

will
imagine the sameness of heaven

and by lunchtime will realize in his boredom

that all water converges

and
must be shared by everyone.

In
these poems there are two dominant figures, both seekers and both women on
opposite sides of the globe, one from South Africa and the other in Niagara
Falls who experience her own individual water.

The
woman from South Africa is seeking water on behalf of the children in her village who are dying of thirst.This is the physical nourishment.

After a year drought,

when one child in three is at risk of death,

she returns from a distant well,

carrying water on her head.

The
other is Annie Edson Taylor who went over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel for something
outside the physical realm: to experience a spiritual awakening or to
experience god-like qualities, that of creation?

Niagara! - over me – under me!-

I spilled into it from every pore,

lost myself

in the
blackness of its roar.

Something
opened- grew wide- and tore-

till
every part of me was new:

Brain.Eyes.Tongue

--down
to the wet soles in my shoes.

I took
my measure, checked my sex

and,
pleased with what I’d made,

I
slapped my back between the blades

and
took a deep breath

of
consciousness.

Regardless
of where we are at in our life - that of being a beggar, spiritualist, or a
seeker-- Joan Murray’s book Swimming For the Ark speaks to the
humanity within all of us, and is a testament that we are all in the same water, no
matter how different our circumstances may be.

PHOTO DESCRIPTION &
COPYRIGHT INFO

1.

White
Pine Press logo

2.

Swimming for the Ark jacket cover

3.

Joan
Murray, image on back jacket cover.

Copyright
granted by White Pine Press

4.

The Same
Water
jacket cover

5.

Looking
for the Parade
and Robert Bly (Public Domain)

6.

Queen of
the Mistand Joyce Carol Oats (Fair
Use)

7.

Dancing On
the Edge

8.

Poems to
Live ByIn
Uncertain Times jacket cover

9.

Poems to
Live ByIn
Troubling Times jacket cover

10.

The
Pushcart Book of Poetry:the Best Poems
from 30 Years of Pushcart Prize jacket cover

11.

Full
Jacket cover of SWIMMING FOR THE ARK

12.

Painting,
Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melons

Attributed
to Murillo Estaban

Public
Domain

13.

First Communion in 1896 by Pablo
Picasso

Public
Domain

14

The Seeker

Attributed
to Christal Rice Cooper

Copyright
granted by Christal Rice Cooper

15

Joan
Murray, image on back jacket cover.

Copyright
granted by White Pine Press

16

Opossum

Sleeping Virginia opossum with
babies in her relaxed pouch

Public
Domain

17

Joseph,
Mary, and Baby Jesus from The History Channel’s “The Bible” Episode 3

Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law

18

White
mouse eating birthday cake

Public
Domain

19

John
Thomas Peele “Feeding the Pets”

Public
Domain

20.

“The Dead Mouse” by Louise Leopold Bolly
I 1793

Public
Domain

21.

The
Beggar Girl

CCASA
2.0 and Fair Use Under the Untied States Copyright Law

22.

types
of cheeses from cheese tasting party

Public
Domain

23.

7
sacraments

Public
Domain

24.

vintage
of father at the refrigerator

Public
Domain

25

Vintage
of Adam and Eve

Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law.

26.

Jimson Weed by Georgia O’Keefe

Painted
in 1936

Photographed
by Zambonia on September 29, 2011

Public
Domain

27.

Mother
Mary in the Phone Booth.

Photo
shopped of two images , both Fair Use, by Christal Rice Cooper

28.

Little
girl pretending to be Mother Mary with the turtle.

Four
images (all Fair Use ad Public Domain) photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper

29.

Annie
Edson Taylor

Public
Domain

30.

The Incredulity of
Thomas
painting by Caravaggio

Public
Domain

31.

A view
of the American, Bridal Veil and Horseshoe Falls from the Presidential Suite of
the Sheraton Fallsview Hotel, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.